"Colossal Magnetic Effect" Could Lead To Another Breakthrough In Storage Tech 105
Bryant writes "Scientists with the Carnegie Institution for Science have discovered what could bring yet another massive advance in memory and storage. The discovery, a magnetoresistence literally 'up to 1000 times more powerful' than the Giant Magnetoresistence Effect discovered roughly 20 years ago, which led to one of the major breakthroughs in memory, seems to be a result of high-pressure interactions between Manganites. Manganites aren't new to this game; MRAM uses Manganite layers to achieve the Magnetic Tunnel Effect needed to keep the state of memory stable. Applying significant amounts of pressure to known tech-useful materials isn't a new trick; you might recall the recent breakthrough with Europium superconductivity thanks to similar high-pressure antics."
And if we can predict anything... (Score:5, Insightful)
This discovery seems to still be in the very preliminary stages. It is premature to conclude that this will lead to substantial improvements. Putting things under high pressure is difficult and keeping them under high pressure is really hard (although from my minimal physics understanding it looks like this could be used to assist in low pressure situations also).
One thing is certain. If this does lead to improvement in memory we'll have a few months of people asking whatever they could do with all that memory. And then a few years after they'll complain that it isn't enough.
Storage.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Storage.... (Score:5, Insightful)
SSDs are good at the first two, but still have catching up to do on the latter (and price...), but as soon as a reasonably priced 1TB version comes out, that'll be a great boon...
Re:Storage.... (Score:2, Insightful)
I heard the same said for 1GB, not 10 years ago.
For shame (Score:4, Insightful)
seems to be a result of high-pressure interactions between Manganites. Manganites aren't new to this game
For shame /. No comments or jokes on the obvious? Its right there for the taking.
Re:Storage.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you saying that 1TB of space should be enough for anyone?
No, but let's be a bit realistic, here. 1 TB is enough space for some 100 hours of DVD-quality video. 1 PB is 100,000 hours of DVD video. If current trends continue, we're fast approaching the point where we really *can* store ALL movies ever produced on a single backpack HDD. We went from a GB to a TB HDD in about 10 years, so it's not unreasonable to think that we'll have 1 PB in another 10. At that time, you can record every second of your life on a single HDD, in RAW format.
With strong lossy compression you can do it now.
The Dollhouse isn't so horribly far away....
Re:Speed and latency matters (Score:3, Insightful)
On an unrelated note, did it take anybody else 5 tries to not read TFA as "High pressure XKCD is a newly developed technique..."
Re:Storage.... (Score:3, Insightful)
"Are you saying that 1TB of space should be enough for anyone?
No, but let's be a bit realistic, here. 1 TB is enough space for some 100 hours of DVD-quality video. 1 PB is 100,000 hours of DVD video. If current trends continue, we're fast approaching the point where we really *can* store ALL movies ever produced on a single backpack HDD. "
You already can store every movie in the world as long as you don't mind the quality. We still can't store all movies in the world in HD-quality. If we offer a huge storage place people will come up with ways to fill it. That's always been the case and it probably will always be the case.
Re:Storage.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure -- of DVD-quality video. Of course, significantly less of HD video, and even less of, say, Ultra HD with 22.2 channel sound.
Sure, if you assume that the growth rate is exponential without bound. OTOH, technologies of all types often flatten out as they mature, and a logistic growth pattern (which looks exponential in its early phase) is perhaps more reasonable of a long-term expectation.
Assuming that you are doing uncompressed, 8 bit/channel RGB images at a measly 640x480 resolution, 1 image per second, 1 PB will only get you less than 39 years of images, so your statement is only true with extremely low resolution images, or short lives.
Re:Speed and latency matters (Score:3, Insightful)
Fine with me. rsync rocks. Tape drives, and particularly optical drives (CDs/DVDs/MOs), have FAR WORSE performance characteristics, and they all refuse to die.
Maybe we'll just see Flash take the place of smaller HDDs, and large slow HDDs take the place of tapes and most uses of optical media.
Re:Storage.... (Score:1, Insightful)
700 MB compressed
Re:Speed and latency matters (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides, who cares how long your site backup takes or how long it takes to fill up your DVR? That's where spinning disks are going.
Any business that want to remain in business cares significantly about backup times. Basically you want to backup as quickly as possible (ie. not during business hours) and if required recover just as quickly. Even with disk to disk backups (great and relatively cheap for home use) you are always going to have a latency problem. Unfortunately the more elaborate a backup and recovery strategy is the more expensive it becomes.
As for a DVR this is normally up to the household although it can be quite funny or stressful when you want backup up you favourite program and you have no more space on the disk. Mass panic to clean up normally happens. Anyone in the IT industry has seen this on a regular basis.
It must be remembered that backups are not about just recovering data to existing systems if required it is about recovering from disasters as well. It is quite scary that many companies have a half hearted approach to backup and recovery and many don't even go through the exercise of testing a disaster recovery scenario since they think it is going to be disruptive or is going to cost too much. Of course these companies are basically a disaster waiting to happen however it is very difficult for IT to explain to management that they need to test their disaster recovery processes when management can't understand that their own PC's need backing up (at least their user data) as well.
Re:Storage.... (Score:4, Insightful)
With the current market focused on exploiting economies of scale to produce the current generation of high density FLASH in 65nm processes. So far this has been VERY lucrative for the companies that bet the farm on building dedicated 65nm fabs for FLASH.
IMO: MRAM has unfortunately come a little late to the party. In it's current role it is kind of the Beta Max of the solid-state storage device market.
Currently only Freescale produces MRAM in any quantity, and they currently only produce 4Mbit parts on a couple of 180nm fabs.
I don't think there is any question that MRAM has the potential to meet or exceed FLASH on the density/price curve. What might keep it out of the high-density market is one of it's great inherent strengths; it doesn't wear out. Who wants to sell storage modules that don't EOL themselves? Try and sell that to your pointy-haired boss' pointy-haired boss...
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General Electric wasn't interested in mass manufactured light bulbs until Edison figured out how to get them to FAIL reliably.
For them that doesn't know: Edison's original design was a carbon impregnated cotton filament, in as near a total vacuum as could be produced in those days. It didn't suffer from filament migration, and other effects that cause modern bulbs to fail. If the original design had been refined as it was, General Electric could have saturated the market for light bulbs in a relatively short time, and been driven out of the market due to the Edison bulb having no predictable EOL.